BALLS! and Things You Put on Your Head.

Tomorrow is the Inner City Knitters Guild Christmas Morning Tea.  The only difference between this meeting and all the others, is that there will be as little business as possible and as much socialisation, knitting and oohing/ahhing as possible.  There will also be a slightly larger morning tea provided by 4 members (instead of the usual 2).  I put my hand up for the Christmas rotation and decided to make Christmas cake balls.  They don’t differ greatly to normal cake balls, you just use a different cake, and have the option of adding a bit of “Christmas Cheer” (ie: alcohol) into them aka rum balls.  As I’m serving a mixed crowd, and it’s MORNING tea, I decided to go safe with some vanilla essence instead.

Recipe

Centre

• 800g Dark Fruit Cake
• 150g dark choc melts
• 2 Tbsp vanilla essence (or rum, whiskey, sherry, port etc)

Coating

• 225g dark choc melts
• 2-3 Tbsp canola or vegetable oil
• 75g white choc melts
• glace cherries for decoration

Method

Crumble fruit cake into a bowl and sprinkle essence/alcohol over the top and[singlepic id=19 w=200 mode=watermark float=right] stir through.  Melt chocolate and add to cake mix.  Mush/blend/mix with hands until the chocolate is mostly evenly distributed and your mixture comes away from the edges of the bowl easily.

Place baking paper onto a tray, and roll mixture into bite size balls and place on tray.  Place tray of balls into freezer for about 4 hours.

Melt dark chocolate and oil, and using a toothpick dip each frozen ball into the melted chocolate until covered, allow excess to drip off, and place on  a new baking paper lined tray. Repeat for all balls, and place tray of chocolate covered balls into fridge until the chocolate has set.

Chop glace cherries into small pieces and melt white chocolate and allow to thicken (cool) slightly.  Using a teaspoon, drizzle a small amount of white chocolate over each ball and place a piece of glace cherry on top so it looks like a little cream covered pudding.  Place tray back in fridge until chocolate is set.

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Serve and enjoy!

I used a small melon baller to measure my balls, (which equates to about 1.5 tsp) so they were evenish, and I yielded about 85 balls.  Of course you can make them larger.  They are quite rich, however, and in my opinion a little bit of rich is nice, and you might find that making them bigger might make them a bit “too much”.

Not all 85 will make it to the morning tea, however.  As I’m sure DH will want to have a taste 😀

Now for things you put on your head!

This is only one of my hats, the ‘hatinator’ isn’t quite finished, as I had to make changes to the overall design.

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It’s a Sinemay hat (banana fibre), in a cranberry colour.  It is a 2 part crown plus brim.  Wired and covered edge with sinemay bias, grograin inner band and grosgrain/sinemay outer band.

It’s obviously too big for “Polly Esther”, but it fits my huge noggin (largest in the class by 3/4 of an inch, including one guy! :S)

I have also made a silk flower to ‘dress it up’ a little when I want to wear it with a bit more of a girly outfit.